IPCC report: Seeing our neighbors and following Jesus

Mark 10: 17-13

This past week the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a report on global climate change. While not surprising for people who have paid attention to previous reports from the IPCC, this report brought with it a much more dire look at our future that has made more people pay attention to the report and understand the urgent need for big changes in the ways we produce and use energy. The prognosis is grim even if we do our best, but our future with dramatic and large-scale changes that mitigate the amount of global warming is a much better future than what we face if we continue with business as usual. According to the report, we have about ten years to turn things around.

This week we also watched Hurricane Michael rapidly grow in intensity over abnormally warm water and bring terrible destruction to the Florida panhandle before continuing into the Carolinas and Virginia with more destructive winds and heavy rains. In case we lacked the imagination to understand the sorts of consequences we face if we fail to mitigate global warming, we had an immediate example with Hurricane Michael. 

In the Church, our Gospel lesson today was the story of the rich man asking Jesus what he must do to inherit eternal life. (Mark 10: 17-31) This man had scrupulously observed the religious law. He had done everything just right to ensure both spiritual and financial well-being. However, he evidently sensed that something was missing, and so he sought out Jesus and humbly asked him if there was something else he needed to do. Jesus told him he lacked one thing. Jesus told this man who was so focused on his own welfare that he needed to sell his possessions, give the money to the poor, and then follow Jesus. Instead of being preoccupied with his own welfare and comfort, he needed to see and serve his neighbors and then follow Jesus. 

In preaching at Church of the Resurrection in Omaha today, I mentioned the IPCC report and talked about the extraordinary times we are living in, suggesting that this story from Mark’s Gospel can help us figure out what to do in the 21st century just as it spoke to the people of Jesus’s time. The contrast between the culture in which we live and the kingdom of God is at least as glaring for us as it was for the people in Jesus’s time. 

The point isn’t that all of us need to sell everything we have, but that we need to put our focus elsewhere. Jesus calls us to look up and out from our own lives so we can see our neighbors and the needs of others, and Jesus calls us to follow him. In today’s world, seeing our neighbors near and far will make it readily apparent that we can’t go on living the way we are living, that we all will have to support changes in business as usual in order for more of us to make it through this century with enough of the basics like food, water, shelter, and basic infrastructure to live good lives.  

We don’t know where Jesus will lead us in the years to come as our culture either changes and adapts or falls apart, but we do know that there are many, many people in the Church who are studying Scripture and listening in prayer and speaking with our wisest teachers and trying to figure out together what it looks like to follow Jesus in these challenging times.

We live in a consumer culture that isn’t working well for us either spiritually or materially. The planet simply cannot sustain the drive to economic growth dependent on us buying more and more stuff, and our souls suffer as well until we ground our priorities in Jesus’s teachings rather than the teachings of our consumer culture. The culture tells us that money can buy happiness — or at least numbness to the pain — while Jesus tells us that the happiness of material success is nothing compared to the joy of following him and giving to others.

While I know some other preachers today talked about the IPCC report and the climate crisis, I also suspect that it went unmentioned in more pulpits. If we are following Jesus and focused on our neighbors near and far, we have to pay attention to these global changes and the effects they are having and will continue to have on people. 

Mark writes that when Jesus told the rich man what he needed to do, the man went away grieving “for he had many possessions”. As a parishioner pointed out today, we don’t know if he went away sad and then kept living as he had lived, or if he went away sad about the big change in his life he was about to make.

If we look away from the climate crisis and fail to advocate for the systemic changes needed to create a more livable world for all of us, we will be like the rich man in the parable if he chose his old way of life over eternal life. If, though, we acknowledge how hard the task ahead is but then go ahead and work at doing it, we will assure our own joy in following Jesus starting now and help assure a greater chance at a sustainable life for all living things on our planet in the future.

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Click here to contribute to Episcopal Relief and Development’s Hurricane Relief Fund.

Click here to read the IPCC’s panel Summary for Policy Makers of last week’s report about the impacts of global warming above 1.5 degrees C. 

Questions

Lent 3: The Woman at the Well

At Church of the Resurrection in Omaha today, Fr. Jason Emerson based this morning’s children’s sermon on the story of Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well (John 4:5-42). After asking the children if anyone knew what a well was – “It’s like a big fish!” “No, that’s a whale. This was a well.” – Fr. Jason told them that in this story Jesus asks the woman at the well a lot of questions, but she also asks Jesus a lot of questions. He told the children that this was a good thing, and they should ask lots of questions, too.

I love watching the children interact with Fr. Jason and with one another, and when I can catch a little of the children’s sermon that takes place right before the beginning of the Sunday morning service, it gives me joy. But that joy was mixed with grave concern for these little ones this morning because of a question in something I had read about climate change before leaving for church, a new post on ClimateBites entitled Is it going to be bad or horrifically bad? That’s the scientific debate.

The post links to this video featuring an interview with climate scientist Justin Wood that encourages us to pay attention and become better educated about climate change:

Justin Wood: 97% of actual active climate scientists agree with that position that climate change is real, it's happening right now, and humans are the overwhelming cause in this century and have been for the last 100 years. 'Is it going to be bad or is it going to be horrifically bad' this is what the scientists debate around, not, you know, “it could be fine”. Nothing like that.

The way we are going, if we continue with business as usual if get these rises of temperature by the end of the century of 4, 6, 8, 10 degrees, then he (Professor Kevin Anderson, Professor of Energy and Climate at University of Manchester, United Kingdom) believes that we would be lucky if 5, maybe 10% of the human pollution survives the century. The planet would essentially be uninhabitable for humans.

Is it going to be bad or horrifically bad? Will human life by the end of this century simply be much more difficult or impossible?

Here is a question for all of us: What are we going to do about it? (As the video suggests, learning more about it is a good first step.)

A major question for the church in this century is: What is the church’s response to climate change? If our response is to ignore it because it seems difficult to talk about it or think about it, or because preachers are afraid of saying anything their congregations might find offensive on a Sunday morning, then we will have failed to be the Body of Christ to a hurting world.

In this morning’s Gospel, Jesus tells the Samaritan woman that the time is coming when “the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth”. People who worship in truth are people who live in truth. If we are lying to ourselves to escape the hard truths of our world and to avoid the hardest moral issue of our time, how can we worship God in truth? If the church can’t find the moral courage rooted in faith to ask the hard questions, who can?

Questions are good. All of us, adults at least as much as children, need to ask lots of questions.

Nebraskans have a great opportunity to learn more about the intersection of faith, climate change, and environmental stewardship in general at a conference, Creation Care for Congregations, on April 26 at Nebraska Wesleyan University co-hosted by Nebraska Interfaith Power & Light and the Nebraska Energy Office. Rabbi Lawrence Troster will give the keynote address “All in the Same Boat: Confronting the Moral and Spiritual Challenge of Climate Change”.

The day’s schedule and more information is available at the Nebraska Interfaith Power and Light website.

Elijah's Question and Floods in Colorado

Our Daily Office lectionary today included I Kings 18:20-40. This is the story of Elijah and the 450 prophets of Baal, with both Elijah and the prophets of Baal preparing a sacrifice and asking their respective deities to send down the fire to burn the sacrifice. Elijah sets up the reason for the test this way:

 Elijah then came near to all the people, and said, ‘How long will you go limping with two different opinions? If the Lord is God, follow him; but if Baal, then follow him.’ 

In other words, Elijah tells them to decide. It’s not possible to worship the Lord and to worship Baal. Elijah is calling for the people to be of one mind instead of two; he is calling them to wholeness, to integrity of word, thought, and action.

Even before I began this morning’s Daily Office reading the terrible flooding along the Front Range in our neighboring state of Colorado was on my mind, and it remained in my thoughts and prayers all day. Throughout the day, I followed stories of rescues and read information about where the flooding was the worst and which roads were closed. The more I heard and read, the more I realized how exceptional this event has been. (See Colorado Flash Flooding: How It Happened, How Unusual? from The Weather Channel for a report of some of its exceptional characteristics.) Not only was there an extraordinary amount of rain produced from an extraordinary amount of moisture in the atmosphere, but the scope of the flooding, the area covered and the number of places affected, distinguishes this from other major floods that have occurred in the region.

Climate scientists had predicted just this sort of scenario as global warming increases:

prolonged periods of heat and drought alternating with heavy precipitation events. Warmer winters have allowed bark beetles to thrive and kill pine trees. With large areas of dead trees coupled with drought and high temperatures, wildfires have left mountainsides bare in several places. Then when record-breaking rainfalls come along, the flooding and its damage are exacerbated by the lack of vegetation.

A post from Subhankar Banerjee (author of Arctic Voices) recalls an outdoor art installation in Boulder six years ago called "Connect the Dots: Mapping the Highwater Hazards and History of Boulder Creek." The installation used blue discs to mark the level of a 500-year flood, and it was part of an art exhibition called “Weather Report: Art and Climate Change”. The intention of the blue dots was to make the warning about future floods less abstract, to take the warning of future levels of flooding outside of people’s previous experience and make the warning more real.

People reading along with the Diocese of Nebraska’s 2013 Bible Challenge are reading Jeremiah right now. The idea of the Connect the Dots exhibit is similar to the sorts of concrete – and often dramatic – actions that God asked Jeremiah and other prophets to do in order to make their prophetic words more concrete and less abstract. (In Jeremiah 19, for example, God has Jeremiah break an earthenware jug to illustrate how God would break the people and the city.)

When the predicted effects of continuing climate change are too abstract, many people find it easy to be of two minds. It’s easy to recognize on a purely intellectual, abstract level what scientists predict as the Earth continues to warm and yet to live our daily lives as if nothing at all has changed. The more real those effects get, though, the more easily we should be able to respond in ways consistent with what we already know. Right now, it seems that most Americans know that global warming is happening, and yet we don’t seem to know this in a way that makes any difference. In most of our personal and political conversations, in our planning for the future, and in the ways we choose to live, we act and talk as if we live on a planet with a stable climate. We know and yet we don’t know.

Along with Elijah’s question, “How long will you go limping with two different opinions?” our Daily Office lectionary brought us John the Baptist (Matthew 3:1-12) exhorting the people to “Bear fruit worthy of repentance”, to act in ways that reflect who they say they are and what they say they believe. Like Elijah, John the Baptist is concerned with what we say we believe and who we say we are being consistent with who we show ourselves to be in our choices and actions.

At the end of his post, Subhankar Banerjee writes:

The Weather Report: Art and Climate Change exhibition, which happened in 2007, visually gave warnings about a deadly flood in the Boulder Creek. Six years have passed. America is yet to take any meaningful action on climate change. Will the death and devastation from this week's flood in Colorado simply pass us by as a mere spectacle?

How long will we go limping with two different opinions?

We pray for all those dealing with the flooding in Colorado. We pray for those who mourn loved ones who have died and for those who have suffered losses of property. We pray for protection and strength for those who are risking their own safety to help others, and for those who are most vulnerable.

Almighty God, in giving us dominion over things on earth you made us fellow workers in your creation: Give us wisdom and reverence so to use the resources of nature, that no one may suffer from our abuse of them, and that generations yet to come may continue to praise you for your bounty; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Collect For the Conservation of Natural Resources (The Book of Common Prayer, p. 827)